Why you should read research papers

• To keep up to date with latest developments in your field
• Generally a great learning, enhances your system design skills, and help you become more creative problem solver
• Do a literature survey of new field you're interested in

Three pass approach

Instead of reading a research paper end to end, consider reading it in passes to grasp the most out of it.

First Pass

• Generally takes 5-10 mins
• Gives a high level overview of what it's about and helps you decide if it's really worth your time
• First, carefully read abstract & introduction
• Read section & sub-section headings, glance at figures, ignore everything else
• Read conclusion

Second pass

• Should take about an hour or so
• Read much more carefully this time, highlighting what you think are the main points. Also free free to add comments/notes in the margin.
• You can chose to ignore the proofs
• After this, you should be able to summarize what the paper is about

Second and half pass

• Re-read your highlights from previous step, take hand written notes of what you think are the main points

Third pass

• (Use your notes rather than paper itself)
• Virtually reimplement the paper, that is, making same assumptions as author try to recreate the work
• Identify and challenge each assumption in every statement

Literature survey

Some tips on finding important papers in a field:

• Start with public search engines (google research or arxiv), based on key-words find 3-5 recent papers
• From the references, find shared citations & repeated authors, these are key research papers & researchers in the area
• Go to the researchers website, find the conferences where they published their work
• Go to conferences website, it should contain list of important papers
• Iterate